What's that you say? It's just winter in Illinois? It's no big deal? ARE YOU CRAZY?! AND WHY ARE YOU ARGUING WITH ME?

Look, bub, this is the worst winter since ever. It just is. I'm not going to dig out anything stupid like "statistics" or "information," because I'm too crabby and impatient to do anything but complain about the weather and survive the ridiculousness.

Saturday, as I shoveled my driveway, the snow load got me huffing and puffing. Tiny ice balls of snow cascaded from the sky, into my open mouth, triggering me to cough and sputter. I was choking on snow, a first for this lifelong Illinoisan.

Then again, this winter is dastardly different. This repeated one-two punch of snow and cold is brutal. Tuesday is supposed to bring us between 4 and 400 inches of snow. Later in the week, we'll approach absolute zero. Again.

Meanwhile, you can see the changes. Cars all have the same color: salt white. Smiles have become an endangered species. Eyes look zombie dull as we all daydream about palm trees and one-way tickets to Florida.

At night, I no longer pray for altruistic aims like world peace. I'm busy asking for divine intervention for my old furnace to stick it out until spring — if, indeed, spring ever returns.

Maybe we should just give in and build igloos. Sound illogical? Maybe. I blame Prairie Madness. That's my precise diagnosis, though I have precisely zero psychology or medical degrees. Still, just like a shrink or sawbones, I can read Wikipedia. Good enough for me, and without any pesky co-pay.

And Wikipedia is where I just found out about Prairie Madness. It's not a disease that you catch with spider bites or whatnot. It's more like a steady grind of lunacy, like in "The Shining." One minute Jack is smiling and pecking a typewriter, the next he's smiling and swinging an ax. Next time you look in the mirror, check for any Nicholson-like glint in the eye.

Prairie Madness afflicted 19th century settlers, often in the prairie states, right next to Illinois. The cause? These migrants came from close-kit villages out East or from overseas, only to find themselves in the middle of nowhere.

Page 2 of 2 - Here's how one settler put it, as recounted in "The Americans: The Democratic Experience," a 1973 book by Daniel Boorstin: "Did you ever hear of 'loneliness' as a fatal disease? You look on, on, on, out into space, almost beyond time itself. You see nothing but ... the monotonous, endless prairie!"

It was bad enough during the summer, when settlers at least could take a wagon to the nearest homestead, where menfolk could smoke corncob pipes and women would discuss calico. Yeah, they were bored to tears, but at least they could get out of the house for a while.

Not in the winter. Blizzards kept them housebound. That's when the frontier people became unhinged. E.V. Smalley wrote in the a 1893 edition of Atlantic Monthly, "An alarming amount of insanity occurs ... among farmers and their wives."

Prairie Madness was particularly hard on women, who were prone to crying and (says Wikipedia) "slovenly dress." I'm not sure what that means: probably the frontier version of yoga pants, day after day after day. You know who you are.

Sound goofy? Goofy enough to land people in asylums. Then again, back then, you could end up in a looney bin for coughing weird, so who knows?

How prevalent was Prairie Madness? Hard to say. Despite those secondary sources cited above, Wikipedia can sometimes sound a little fanciful. For example, in its Cabin Fever entries, you'll find this gem, "Cabin Fever was an incident of sudden berserk violence when two trappers or mountain men attempted to overwinter in small cabins in the 1830s." And there's this one: "There are stories of an axe murder in Russian polar station during an argument over a chess game." I could find no corroboration of those stories, but I think that "Russian Axmen: Extreme Chess!" would be an awesome reality show.

Or, maybe I'm wrong: maybe we're suffering Pibloktoq, also known as Arctic Hysteria. This is, seriously, a real syndrome. According to the Encyclopedia of Immigrant Health, it affects Inughuit people who live above the Arctic Circle, mostly women.

They get irritable and antisocial for a few days. Then they blow up: screaming, throwing things and ripping off their clothes, outside in bitter cold. Seizures or coma can briefly follow, then recovery happens fast, sometimes with amnesia wiping out the whole episode.

Perhaps that's what's going on. Perhaps Peoria has become encompassed by the Arctic Circle. Have you checked a weather map lately? You never know, especially if amnesia is involved.

And maybe amnesia isn't a bad thing. Maybe we'll forget this whole dreadful winter, and we'll suddenly be in the middle of a nice, hot summer.